NEW
YORK, Jan. 20, 2000 — No doubt
the Internet has its dark side, its labyrinth of sex shops, scams
and frauds. But the Net is also an arena for good works. As one
little-known, American expatriate composer has shown, it is a potent
tool for bringing change even to the most hidebound of cultural
institutions, the Vienna
Philharmonic.

Osborne
challengedthe Vienna Philharmonic’sall-male sexism - and provided
the intellectual underpinning for street protests at Carnegie Hall in New
York.

THROUGH HIS ADROIT and impassioned use of the Net, William Osborne
mobilized a tiny, far-flung band of feminists who pressured the Vienna Philharmonic — among
the world’s highest-paid orchestras and, historically, the most important
in terms of symphonic music — to accept a woman member for the first time
since it was founded in 1842. Osborne, who
has lived in Germany for the past 19 years, not only challenged the Vienna
Philharmonic’s traditional all-male ideology; by disseminating detailed
scholarly articles about the orchestra’s operations on the World Wide Web,
he provided the intellectual underpinning for street protests at Carnegie
Hall in New York and caught the attention of the traditional media — the
very catalysts that led to the hiring of harpist Anna Lelkes in
1997.

William Osborne

Cybergrass — Osborne’s term
for grassroots activism in cyberspace — is neither new nor limited to the
cultural arena. In the world of finance, disgruntled shareholders have
organized via the Internet to influence bankruptcy negotiations; labor
unions have seen rank-and-file rebellions fostered on the Net. But Osborne
vs. the Vienna Philharmonic provides a fascinating, even unique, case
study in the annals of musicology and the wider world of grassroots
activism.

‘ART IS JUST AN
EXCUSE’ More than three years
ago, in “Art Is
Just an Excuse,” the first of several seminal essays, Osborne
contended that the Vienna Philharmonic’s belief in male supremacy was
gender bias of the worst sort, rooted in a historical rationale of
national identity and cultural purity, and that its exclusionary policy
was part of an intolerable racist heritage. The orchestra’s discriminatory
practices, he argued, cast such a pall over its considerable artistic
achievement that the institution has turned out to be the shame, not the
pride, of Western civilization.

. Chief among Osborne’s allies were
Monique Buzzarte, a New York freelance musician and writer who put up a Zap the VPO Web
site to encourage and track the protest, influencing the National
Organization of Women to get involved, and Varda Ullman Novick, a Los
Angeles media researcher and pollster who acted as a traffic catalyst,
instigating debate by forwarding e-mail messages to key music list
servers. “Actually, the Vienna Philharmonic
couldn’t have cared less about us,” Osborne adds. “What we say doesn’t
count. It’s what the New York Times says that counts. The most important
thing was to use the orchestra as a clear illustration of how reactionary
classical music is. If it were just the Vienna Philharmonic, the whole
issue would be much too parochial to bother with.
“The real issue, which the orchestra validates, is that women are
not treated fairly in music,” he says. “I wanted to show that we’re not
just talking through our hats, that this is a really important problem. In
a certain way, taking on the Vienna Philharmonic is a means to a bigger
end. I couldn’t care less about Viennese parochialism. That’s a backwoods
place, Vienna, if you want to know the truth. I’m trying to focus on
classical music at the end of the 20th century.”

POWER AND
INFLUENCE Parochial or not, the
power and influence of the Vienna Philharmonic is evident 157 years after
it gave its first concert as an ensemble (then called the Philharmonic
Academy) to present what was at the time a new genre of post-Beethoven
symphonic music.

The VPO’s golden image

First minted by the Austrian
National Bank in 1990, the success of the "Philharmoniker" gold coin
as a collector's item worldwide has been tied largely to the
orchestra's legendary reputation. According to government
statistics, 106.5 tons of pure gold have been used to create some
five million Philharmoniker coins worth roughly $1.1
billion.

•

Jan Herman,
MSNBC

Today, the Vienna Philharmonic not only commands the highest concert
fees of any orchestra — as much as $200,000 a night, and sometimes more,
on standing-room-only international tours — it sells more recordings and
earns more money for its members than any other orchestra, except perhaps
for the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. Its reported annual income amounts
to about $15 million after expenses, income divided among the 150 players.
In addition, Philharmonic members earn large government salaries for their
jobs in the Vienna State Opera orchestra, and a significant minority earn
yet a third salary, also government-paid, to teach at the Vienna Music
Academy.

LONG, BITTER
EXPERIENCE Part composer, social
historian and musicologist, Osborne came to the issue of gender bias
through long and bitter experience. For many years, he and his wife, Abbie
Conant, a classical trombonist, fought sexism in the Munich Philharmonic.
Their court battles with that orchestra, following Conant’s arbitrary
demotion from solo to second trombone, ultimately ended in a
precedent-setting legal victory — but not before she struggled “through
some of the worst experiences of my life,” she says, “simply because I was
a woman trombonist.”

Building on his Munich experience, Osborne posted his first Internet
message about the Vienna Philharmonic on Oct. 16, 1995. The detailed note
described the orchestra’s belief that “gender and ethnic uniformity give
it aesthetic superiority.” Sent to a list of American trombone and trumpet
players, the message received little notice; but four days later it was
forwarded to the International
Horn Society, where it caused extensive discussion. Within two weeks,
e-mail traffic amounted to 50 pages of printouts.

USING THE
INTERNET “At that point,” Osborne
says, “I began using the entire music area of the Internet [list servers,
news groups and chat rooms] to try to raise a protest.”
On Jan. 24, 1996, he sent documented information about the
orchestra’s categorical
exclusion of women to various music lists: Gender in Music, the International Alliance for Women in
Music, the International Trombone
Association, the IHS, and various trumpet, tuba and brass groups. His
information was forwarded separately to the lists of the International
Conference of Symphonic Musicians, the American Musicological
Society and others, for a total of 11 groups that he knew about. Later
he learned that feminist, opera and labor-relations organizations also got
the information, causing e-mail discussion (especially at ICSOM) that
continued unabated for months. Another
Osborne post (“More VPO Info”) followed, encouraging gender-in-music
scholars to begin writing about sexism in the Philharmonic and other
orchestras. He contended — correctly, as it turned out — that reporters in
the traditional mass media would take notice. He also urged members of
Gender in Music to write the orchestras themselves, and he supplied
addresses. Yet another significant post (“Orchestras
and Social Reality”) went to the IAWM and seven other lists on Jan.
31, 1996. “It was not specifically about the Vienna Phil, but rather about
what people could do to oppose discrimination,” Osborne notes. Relentless
as ever, he wrote largely in response to questions that had been raised in
the e-mail discussions but hadn’t been answered. This time he drew a
direct link to the case of Conant vs. the Munich Philharmonic, using it as
a concrete example of a successful action.

IMPACT IN REAL
WORLD Within days, on Feb. 2,
1996, he received his first e-mail inquiry from a journalist, Andreas
Saenz of La Nacion in Costa Rica, who proposed writing an article. “Saenz
did the piece and predicted protests against the Vienna Phil more than a
year before they actually happened,” Osborne says. “He based his
prediction on the activity that was evolving on the Internet.”
Osborne soon began to see the impact of his cybergrass
campaign in the real world. On Feb. 13, 1996, West German State Radio
interviewed members of the Vienna Philharmonic to get their views on the
growing controversy. What they said in defense of the orchestra’s
exclusionary policy merely confirmed Osborne’s critique.
“From the beginning,” flutist Dieter Flury explained, “we
have spoken of the special Viennese qualities, of the way music is made
here. [It] is not only a technical ability, but also something that has a
lot to do with the soul. The soul does not allow itself to be separated
from the cultural roots that we have here in central Europe; and it also
doesn’t allow itself to be separated from gender.
“So if you think the world should operate according to quotas,”
Flury went on, “then it’s naturally irritating that we’re a group of
white-skinned male musicians that exclusively performs the music of
white-skinned male composers. It’s a racist and sexist irritant. I believe
you have to put it that way. If you establish superficial egalitarianism,
you lose something very significant. Therefore, I’m convinced that it is
worthwhile accepting this racist and sexist irritant, because something
produced by a superficial understanding of human rights would not live up
to the same standards.” If that wasn’t clear
enough, Roland Girtler, a professor of sociology at the University of
Vienna, added: “Another important argument against women is that they can
bring the solidarity of men into question. You find that in all men’s
groups. And the women can also contribute to creating competition among
the men. They distract men.”

THE PROTEST
BEGINS Osborne lost no time
exploiting such remarks. He transcribed and translated that radio
interview, and posted the transcript on the Internet in both English and
German. This prompted the IAWM, an organization largely comprising female
academics and composers, to begin formulating a protest action. Much
discussion centered on possibly using the street-theater tactics of the
Guerrilla Girls, a New York-based artists’ collective whose anonymous
members don gorilla masks in their actions. Osborne demurred. “Most people
are not aware of the Vienna Philharmonic’s employment policies,” he wrote
in a May 14, 1996, e-mail. “A simple and dignified protest by women
musicians in front of the concert halls during the orchestra’s
international tours, along with factual advance letters to the media,
would be all that it takes to create a lot of publicity.”
Ten months later, in the weeks leading up to and during the
orchestras’s winter tour of the United States in February and March of
1997, events would prove him correct. In the meantime, he continued to
prepare the ground, teaming up with Monique Buzzarte, who had been reading
Osborne’s Internet messages. As she followed
the e-mail debate, Buzzarte recalls, she was struck by a message from one
of the IAWM leaders saying it wasn’t the group’s role to get involved in
an orchestra protest. “That made me go ballistic,” she recounts. “It was
like a leader of the NAACP saying it shouldn’t get involved in civil
rights.” Buzzarte sent a stinging reply to that effect and volunteered to
help coordinate any effort that might be initiated. “It sealed my fate,”
she says. “The IAWM made me a board member and allocated about $300 for me
to do something. You can’t even do postage with that. So I thought the
best thing was to use the power of the Internet and
mass-forwarding.”

ZAPPING THE
VPO Buzzarte set up her
provocative, highly organized ZAP the VPO
Web site, launching it on Nov. 15, 1996, with service instructions (“What
can I do?”), background information (“Who’s taken a stand?”), dates and
places for demonstrations, a news archive of media coverage and an online
library, as well as links to other music- and government-related Web sites
and mailing lists. She wrote prominent musicians and feminists — “Anybody
I knew or thought I could get hold of by e-mail” — asking for a statement
of solidarity. “They were just b-flat requests: ‘Here’s what I’m doing.
I’m soliciting comments that I can parlay; I will post your response on my
Web site.’” Her campaign, dubbed VPO Watch,
also displayed a sense of humor in the use of such slogans as
“Testosterone Is Not An Instrument” and “Don’t Let the Men of the Vienna
Philharmonic Keep Playing With Themselves.”

A majority of those articles
came on the eve of the Vienna Philharmonic’s 1997 American tour, and
another 75 appeared in the aftermath of the historic vote “on the woman
question” (bitter words of the orchestra’s then-chairman Werner Resel, who
opposed the vote and soon resigned). Most
of the press reports contained information and ideas traceable to
Osborne’s original e-mail messages and article postings.
During that same six-week period, traffic on the ZAP the VPO
Web site was astonishing by the standards of classical-music groups, if
not by the Internet’s. Buzzarte doesn’t know exactly how many people
logged on — “I stopped counting after 10,000 hits,” she says — but she
estimates enough people visited her site to fill 5,000-seat Carnegie Hall
many times over. Which is just the sort of thing that would concern the
Vienna Philharmonic or any major touring orchestra, Osborne
maintains.

HISTORIC VOTE

The historic
vote to admit a woman came on Feb. 27, 1997, the same day that the
orchestra flew off to the United States to play at Carnegie Hall.

It was no coincidence, he adds, that the historic vote to admit a
woman came on Feb. 27, 1997, the same day that the orchestra flew off to
the United States to play at Carnegie Hall. (In its only other U.S. stop
on that tour, the Vienna Philharmonic played three concerts at the Orange
County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, Calif., where about 150
protestors demonstrated.) Perhaps not
surprisingly, the battle for public opinion of the New York intelligentsia
matters as much to Osborne as it does to the orchestra. “In fact, it’s
more important to change the thinking of the New York Times — and
therefore the thinking of the New York intelligentsia, which reads it
faithfully — than to change the Vienna Philharmonic.
“Columbia Artists, the agency that controls something like 95
percent of the world’s name conductors, is headquartered in Manhattan,”
Osborne continues. “That says something about why the Vienna Phil, which
uses only guest conductors, cares what the New York Times says. It’s
basically the only paper they [the orchestra] read from America. And it’s
not so much that they go to America as to Carnegie Hall.”
Despite demonstrations in front of Carnegie Hall for three
consecutive years however — never large, the turnouts dwindled from 80 or
so protestors in 1997 to eight in 1999 — the Vienna Philharmonic continued
to play sold-out concerts. And while the New York Times had reported the
admission of the harpist Anna Lelkes into the orchestra as front-page
news, its music critics did not take the issue of gender bias
seriously. In a 1997 column, the Times chief
music critic Bernard Holland dismissed the protest with a condescending
brush-off. His disdain was palpable. “What we seem to be witnessing,” he
wrote, “is a clash of two provincial capitals.” In his opinion, the issue
was a mere misunderstanding between insular, old-fashioned, but
respectable keepers of tradition in Vienna and newfangled, impatient,
Southern California hicks in Culver City (where the then-president of the
IAWM lived). “Culver City may have a hard time understanding that the
values so immediately important to it may not be important to the
Viennese, even to many of its women,” Holland wrote. It was the same
unction the orchestra used to excuse itself.
The following year, when the orchestra arrived in New York (on the
first anniversary of Lelkes’s hiring), the Times’s classical music editor
James R. Oestreich interviewed Resel’s replacement, the new orchestra
chairman Clemens Hellsberg, and took at face value Hellserg’s claim that
the orchestra was now committed to hiring women.
Oestreich gave considerable legitimacy to the claim that gender
discrimination was a thing of the past, even though the orchestra had just
filled four jobs in the string and brass sections with men again, instead
of with women. The orchestra had not only failed to hire a woman but, as
reported in the Los Angeles Times, had declined to audition a highly
qualified female candidate for solo viola. (She was Vienna Academy-trained
violist Gertrude Rossbacher who had played for 10 years in the Berlin
Philharmonic, where she’d been hired by its legendary conductor Herbert
von Karajan. The Vienna orchestra filled the solo viola position with a
male second violinist, not a regular viola player, from the Vienna State
Opera.)

SECOND WOMAN
HIRED

‘The Vienna
Phil is trying to present this as a big step forward. But hiring women
harpists is nothing new. Male harpists are rare.’ — WILLIAM
OSBORNE

On the eve of the 1999 tour, as though to lend credence to the New
York Times’s reporting, the orchestra announced it would hire a second
women, Julie Palloc, another harpist. She will join the orchestra this
year, when Lelkes is expected to retire.
“The Vienna Phil is trying to present this as a big step forward,”
Osborne says. “But hiring women harpists is nothing new. Male harpists are
rare. Lelkes played for more than 20 years with the orchestra as a
permanent subsitute, without being granted membership in the club. She
earned less pay and her name never appeared in the programs. She was a
non-person.” In any case, female harpists do
not figure in the central equation of the orchestra’s psychology or its
music-making. As second violinist Helmut Zehetner told a German
interviewer: “If you ask how noticeable gender is with these colleagues,
my personal experience is that this instrument is so far at the edge of
the orchestra that it doesn’t disturb our emotional unity.”
For the first time, however, a New York Times critic,
Anthony Tommasini, took serious notice of the orchestra’s sexism by
reviewing its 1999 Carnegie Hall concerts in the context of Osborne’s
charges, rather than treating gender bias as a moral issue wholly separate
from art. Without naming Osborne, he quoted from one of Osborne’s IAWM
articles and, while still praising the quality of the playing, endorsed
the view that the orchestra’s continuing sexism is wrong artistically as
well as ethically.

‘MAKES NO
SENSE’ “Obviously, the unanimity
of purpose that the Vienna Philharmonic has achieved is a precious thing
and you can understand their fear of diluting it,” Tommasini wrote. “But
what accounts for this quality? The maleness of the players? Maybe that
was so in a time when women routinely were oppressed, but it makes no
sense any longer.” When Tommasini’s review
appeared, Osborne was jubilant. “So finally we got the truth into the New
York Times,” he e-mailed associates. “The Times’s previous dismissal of
your protests played a large role in bolstering the orchestra’s resistance
to change.” Osborne considers Tommasini’s
review “a real breakthrough.” He also regards it as a piece of virtuoso
writing. “As a critic, he kept a dignified tone and yet he lambasted
them.” When making his own arguments on the Net, Osborne had bent over
backwards to write in sober tones and to offer well-documented notes. “If
you want to be responsible, that’s how you must do it,” he insists. “I had
to write as though I were producing lab reports.”
Despite the push-button ease of the Internet, Osborne’s work was
long and lonely. Over the months and years, he gave considerable thought
to the strategy and tactics that made for a successful cybergrass
campaign. “When you’re picking out somebody
to pick on, there are certain rules,” he says. “For instance, I heard of
some people trying to get up a protest about the fact that there are so
few women band directors in the public schools. Well, how do you protest
against 10,000 local school boards? You can’t.
“You have to pick out a single institution that’s in the media
limelight and has a certain vulnerability.”

PERFECT
TARGET

‘The Met
hasn’t done an opera by a woman since 1903. There aren’t many around, but
there are enough of them.’ — WILLIAM
OSBORNE

He cites the Metropolitan Opera as a perfect target.
“That would get a lot of attention,” Osborne says,
“and it would be very useful. The Met hasn’t done an opera by a woman
since 1903. There aren’t many around, but there are enough of them. And
even if they thought there weren’t any at all, why haven’t they
commissioned one? The Met is very vulnerable there.”
But although a protest against the Met “would have enormous
potential,” he has no intention of taking it on. “It’s a lot of work,” he
says, “and it would be better to get somebody who’s a real opera
aficianado. I know the inside workings of German-speaking orchestras like
the back of my hand. I know what they’re going to say and do before they
do it. I don’t know the opera world as well.”
Still, if someone were to take on the Met, Osborne emphasizes, the
real issue is not the opera itself but the status of women in
music. “The Met is just a vivid illustration
of how bad things are for women composers. That the major American opera
house hasn’t done an opera by a woman during the entire 20th century is
worth protesting. Even the major European opera houses have done their
token women.” Osborne shakes his head,
marveling at such basic and incontrovertible facts. Then he wonders out
loud with a Cheshire cat’s smile whether cybergrass against the Met would
get any takers. “Maybe somebody will do
it,” he says. “I hope so.”•